I'm old to computers. I've been building them since 1992. But I'm really new to linux. I've tried linux a few times. But I've never really had the patients for it before. Redhat 4.3 really didn't like my S3 lb vesa graphic's card. But I really did like its partitioning utility.. Tried diffrent versions of suse. Really had little appeal as I never could get my head around yast. Or the shell consoles. Though I have had some limited success with wine. Linux had little appeal to me until recently. As I often setup and repair computers. And I've seen Vista afew times now. (And I am seriously not amused!) In fact I would never allow XP on one of my riggs until it was suitibly patched and neutered. (Fixed LOL)
But as software continues to get more and more intrusive. And more and bloated as the hardware improves. And freedom dies a little more everyday. I've decided try to gradually break from commercial software(Meaning MicroSlop and its thrid parties).

So I've set up one of my older rigs. Water cooled Lan-party ultra-b skt-A rig.
That runs 24/7 doing torrents. I've installed Ubuntu 7.10 32bit OS. In the hope that I can learn enough to be able to get around fairly well in linux. In the next coupla' years.
Sofar I've managed to get wine in and got utorrent up and running. Coupla' minor problems there. But it works well enough for now. More on that later.

So I guess I'd better get down to my first questions.

First of all I guess I'd better ask about security. And Ubuntu's default settings. I'm on cable and I need to know what I might need to install,or turn on or off as the case maybe.. No sense in getting hacked right off the bat. Eh?

Then back to my emulated utorrent. It did setup as default when it installed according to the installer. But it when I click on a torrent it won't load. I have to drag the torrent file over and drop it in utorrents dl window. Then it takes off..LOL
Another thing is is utorrent can't see my mounted fat32 storage drives. Linux see's em' fine. I can read from and write to. But I can't dl my torrents directly to them.

I was going to ask about porting over Classic Media Player w/mega codec pack. But I believe. I've seen someone else has allready done it. That has to be the best media player ever.(Windows media player Yuck! Spyware! havent bothered with it since 98se)LOL......
But "MediaPlayer-Classic" That's darned close to a must have.

Best to all of you. And thanks for having me.....

You're not going to get hacked unless you run as root all of the time, and then you would have to do something stupid - like run a virus laden program or something on purpose!
As far as a torrent program goes, get rid of the one you use now and find a different one - I'd suggest bittornado!
I don't know about Media Player but Linux has better ones - just look around in synaptic.
By the way - the 7.10 family of Buntus rule!!!

I suggest using Amarok for a media player. You need to install codecs before you can play music(except for .oggs)

im running ubuntu 7.10 and trust me you dont need to emulate anything all you need to do is use synaptic (goto system>>admin>>synaptic) type your password (your login not roots) then find whatever you need theres literally over 10s of thousands of packages by default!!!

99% of all that windows does linux does too....

Thanks guys I'm still fiddlin' with it. Sofar I really like. Best distro I've ever tried. And thusfar I'm very pleased. Nenerwinter Nights HoTU plays well enough. But I'm still lookin' For a good all in 1 mediaplayer. I'll try to get classic media player to work a few more times. But the guys over at wine didn't seem to like it.(For windoors it's the best.) But they gave "mediaplayer-9" a gold rating.(Yuck!) There is a new mediaplayer project starting off over at sourceforge.net I will try to offer some suggestions. If I can find mt login and password.. (Maybe see if I could help somehow)

I suggest Amarok or VLC